Founding Religion vs Capturing Religion

[kenneth1221]

When playing as a warmonger, what are the pros and cons of founding your own religion vs capturing one from the welcoming holy city of a friendly neighboring AI? I can think of a few, but I play at Warlord/Price so my experiences probably aren't indicative of higher difficulties so I'm curious what your opinions are.

Founding pros and cons:
+ Can hand-pick useful beliefs like Hero Worship, Diligence, Orders, and Zealotry
- Need to generate the faith for 2 prophets
- Need to focus on faith in the early game (possibly to the detriment of units)

Capturing early pros and cons:
+ You only need enough faith to earn 1 great prophet to get an enhanced religion. If you weren't utterly neglecting faith, you can have a full religion years before anyone else
+ More faith for other uses
+ First pick at second follower belief and enhancer
- Can't choose founder belief, or the first follower belief

Capturing a fully founded religion:
- I can't think of anything this would get you that the other two options wouldn't.

 

[CrazyG]

A pro/con you didn't mention is your pantheon. If that AI took God-King, boy are you happy to take that. Sometimes you can get stuck with something you don't really want.

For warmonger with the authority policy tree, it seems to me that inspiration (1 culture per 2 followers) is the best follower by a pretty big margin, and generally food beliefs and churches aren't very good. So generally capturing is a little bit risky, but has a really high pay off.

My choice to found or capture will often be determined by what civ I am playing. Sweden should just take somebody's elses. The Aztec will make one themselves. Someone like Japan has options and could go either way.

 

[kenneth1221]

A pro/con you didn't mention is your pantheon. If that AI took God-King, boy are you happy to take that. Sometimes you can get stuck with something you don't really want.

A very good point, though I think I've been severely underestimating God-King. I hadn't realized that it was basically built for wide play with massive bonus yields in every city.

For warmonger with the authority policy tree, it seems to me that inspiration (1 culture per 2 followers) is the best follower by a pretty big margin, and generally food beliefs and churches aren't very good. So generally capturing is a little bit risky, but has a really high pay off.

You know, somehow I've never put two and two together and realized the synergy between Inspiration and Authority's Tribute. But could you clarify what you mean by the high pay-off? Is it faith saved on prophet #2 or the faster 2nd beliefs or both or something else I'm not noticing?

 

[CrazyG]

You know, somehow I've never put two and two together and realized the synergy between Inspiration and Authority's Tribute. But could you clarify what you mean by the high pay-off? Is it faith saved on prophet #2 or the faster 2nd beliefs or both or something else I'm not noticing?

The pay-off is higher than founding your own religion not only because you get to enhance and get your extra beliefs faster, but also because you got to be greedy in the early game. For example, building monuments before shrines will put you farther ahead in social policies.

The risk is that your neighbors either don't found, or found crappy religions (for a warmonger).